Killing in Greenwich Village Looks Like Hate Crime, Police Say

A memorial in Greenwich Village for Mark Carson, a gay man who was fatally shot early Saturday in what the police called a hate crime.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

By JAMES BARRON

May 19, 2013

In Greenwich Village, there are different worlds. There is the world of wealthy people who own their own brownstones or live in stylish new apartment buildings. There is the world of gay men and lesbians and the bars they go to. And there is the world of heterosexuals and the bars they go to.

Those last two worlds collided in the waning moments of Friday night in a kind of in-between zone, a corner on the Avenue of the Americas that is more fast-food restaurants and chain stores than quiet cafes and quaint architecture. The police say that Elliot Morales, 33, trailed and taunted two men, yelling antigay slurs and asking one of them, “You want to die tonight?”

The police say it was the other man, Mark Carson, 32, who died after Mr. Morales fired a single bullet from a revolver.

On Sunday, the police filed murder and weapons charges against Mr. Morales, and several lesbian and gay groups made plans for a march on Monday to the scene of the shooting. And, as he had on Saturday, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, characterized the shooting as a hate crime.

“It is clear that the victim here was killed only because and just because he was thought to be gay,” he said before delivering a commencement address in White Plains. “There is no question about that.”

But Mr. Morales’s sister, Edith Gutierrez, said she did not believe he could have committed a bias crime — they have relatives who are gay, she said, and Mr. Morales had shown no signs of homophobia. She also said that when Mr. Morales telephoned her from jail on Sunday, “he said he doesn’t remember anything; he was under the influence, he was drinking.”

Mr. Morales, 33, said nothing at his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Sunday. Judge Robert Stolz ordered him held without bail and scheduled another hearing for Thursday.

Mark Carson

The police also questioned two men who had been with Mr. Morales just before the shooting. They were questioned as witnesses, not as suspects, and were cooperating with detectives, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. He did not identify them.

Mr. Morales — who had served more than 10 years in prison for a robbery conviction, according to state correction records — had been staying with one of the men in Far Rockaway, Queens. Detectives found a second gun among Mr. Morales’s belongings there, a Serbian-made Zastava that the police described as an assault weapon. Mr. Browne said that sometime earlier, the man had told Mr. Morales that it made him uncomfortable to have the gun around his children.

Mr. Carson’s killing was the first in the West Village precinct this year. In all of 2012, one homicide was reported there.

But through the first week in May, there were 57 assaults, a sharp increase over the same period last year, when there were 33. According to police statistics, the number of violent altercations is higher this year than it was a decade ago but lower than in the 1990s, when citywide crime was higher.

“Things seem a little more hostile in the Village lately,” said Glennda Testone, the executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center on West 13th Street. “People have been saying it’s especially on the weekends, when there is more of a commuter crowd. Perhaps what we’re seeing is that the growing approval of the L.G.B.T. community and the increasing equality isn’t reaching to every single street.”

Sharon Stapel, the executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, said antigay violence had been worsened by the forces that are reshaping the city. “The Village has always been a place where L.G.B.T. people have felt accepted and respected,” she said, “but the Village is not immune from this vitriolic anti-L.G.B.T. violence. And we are not a homogeneous community. If you talk to young non-gender-conforming kids of color, they’re going to have a very different experience than older white L.G.B.T. people.”

The police say they have moved to stem felony assaults in the West Village that can often be traced to bar fights and late-night confrontations.

“That’s why there was an impact officer on duty there in the first place, the one who captured the shooter,” said Mr. Browne, referring to officers assigned to areas in need of additional policing. “The Village attracts crowds of visitors, especially on weekends, and impact officers are assigned there as a result.”

The police said that on Friday night, Mr. Morales and the two men had gone to the neighborhood and that Mr. Morales had urinated in front of the Annisa bar and restaurant on Barrow Street at West Fourth Street. The police said he then went inside and confronted the bartender with antigay slurs. He yanked up his sweatshirt, showing off a revolver in a shoulder holster, and threatened to kill the bartender if he called 911, the police said.

In the police account, Mr. Morales and his two companions left, walking along the Avenue of the Americas and encountering Mr. Carson and the man he was with at West Eighth Street. Again Mr. Morales unleashed a stream of antigay slurs. “What are you, a gay wrestler?” he asked.

Mr. Carson and his friend went on their way, and Mr. Morales pursued them, the police said. One of Mr. Morales’s friends peeled off and left after failing to dissuade him from doing so, the police said.

“Hearing someone shout racial or homophobic slurs is not unusual here,” said Jessica Berk, a neighborhood activist and lifelong resident. “The victims of low-level crime — muggings, street harassment, attempted assault — have traditionally been gay men,” she said, adding, “It’s as if a memo goes out to all the muggers and troublemakers.”

Mark Erson, the pastor at St. John’s Lutheran Church on Christopher Street, said minutely local geography had to be factored in. “The shooting happened over on Sixth Avenue, so you know, you go one block over and there could be a complete change of feeling and atmosphere,” he said, adding that some of the violence in the neighborhood could be drug-related. “If someone strung out sees a vulnerable person, and unfortunately gay people are seen as vulnerable, one thing could lead to another.”

Mr. Carson had worked as a manager at the Ciao Bella gelato kiosk in Grand Central Terminal. Isabella Odonkor, 20, worked with him there and she said he had risen quickly, because he was “very good with people.” If someone stopped by while he was tidying up after closing time, he would still make the sale, she said.

She said that as far as she knew, Mr. Carson had always been open about being gay. “He was not afraid of it, not afraid to share it,” she said.

She also said that he had endured occasional antigay slurs from customers.

“He’d always just laugh it off,” she said, because “he was proud of who he was.”

Correction: May 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. She is Glennda, not Glenda.